Six Good Reasons to Oppose Mandatory Fingerprinting

In the wake of the clergy sex abuse scandal bishops have rushed to implement programs to protect children and comply with policies developed at their 2002 meeting in Dallas. Part of the strategy in many dioceses is mandatory fingerprinting of all employees and those volunteers who work with children. But fingerprinting the innocent is a bad idea for six good reasons.

(1) It masks the real problems that caused the scandals - clergy homosexuality and dissent;

(2) gives a false sense of security while ignoring legal abuse;

(3) violates privacy and demeans the innocent by creating a suspect class of Catholics;

(4) implies secular authority over the Church;

(5) drives a wedge between the flock and their pastor, and

(6) is the work of bureaucrats, not apostles.

For all these reasons prudent members of the faithful should just say no to fingerprinting.

Still, after all this time, the first reason above has still not been addressed even though Bishop Bruskewitz made every effort to get his brother bishops to acknowledge this back in 2002. Instead, futile attempts continue to spew forth from those who claim to be "protecting children"...And the gullible are lapping it up...

Read the thorough article by Mary Ann Kreitzer - Catholic Media Coalition, here, it's an eye opener for those who are still reluctant to acknowledge the detrimental influence of homosexuality in the priesthood...

Mandatory fingerprinting and background checks cannot solve a problem that is fundamentally rooted in a crisis of faith and a failure to govern. Dissent is so pandemic across the country that well-known Jesuit Fr. John Hardon, S.J. who died in 2000 warned for years that many dioceses in America would completely disappear. His words echo those of eminent theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand who in 1973 lamented one of the "most horrifying and widespread diseases" in the Church, "the lethargy of the guardians of the Faith… [who] fear men more than God...

Ain't it the truth?